In the glossy narratives of artificial intelligence, Australia – and the wider West – stands on the threshold of Universal Abundance. Machines will free us from toil, algorithms will optimise every need, and the old constraints of scarcity will dissolve into a post-work utopia.
Yet the latest figures from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) offer a colder preview of what awaits those rendered economically superfluous, the so-called “useless eaters”.
Among working-age Australians, the people already most dependent on income support are dying at rates that expose the gap between technological promise and lived misery.
Between 2012 and 2022, nearly 287,000 people aged 22–64 died in Australia. Almost three in five of them – 58.2 per cent, or roughly 167,000 – had received at least one of the main income-support payments in the calendar year of their death.
Recipients of those payments died at an average rate of 610 per 100,000 person-years, against 67 for those outside the system – more than nine times higher.
Disability Support Pension recipients faced the steepest toll, at around 1,600 deaths per 100,000. Unemployment payment recipients averaged 270, four times the non-recipient rate.
As TOTT News reported in its coverage of the AIHW data, the disparity is stark and concentrated among those already on the margins. The publication, unique in the Australian media landscape, argues: “The gap between the top 1% of society and the rest of us is only getting bigger, while the middle class is systematically destroyed before our very eyes. Especially now, considering that AI is threatening to push us all towards a modern form of Western economic communism, Universal Basic Income.”
Government dependence is a slow-form of self-harm, and something that is desired for control of the human herd. The parasites in control of our government want nothing more than a sicker, poorer, and more dependent populous.
TOTT NEWS
The causes reinforce the pattern. Coronary heart disease and lung cancer led the list for income-support recipients, but “deaths of despair” stood out with particular force.
Accidental poisoning deaths ran 22 times higher among recipients than non-recipients; alcoholic liver disease 21 times higher; suicide five times higher.
These are not abstract statistics. They describe people whose lives have already been stripped of the ordinary structures – steady work, local ties, modest independence – that once buffered against isolation and decline.
Globalisation has long been eroding those structures in Australia. Regional industries contracted, community institutions thinned, and successive waves of economic liberalisation prioritised mobile capital and imported labour over rooted local economies.
Customs and habits that once organised working-class and regional life – shared workplaces, neighbourhood associations, the expectation that most adults would contribute productively – have been steadily weakened.
The welfare system expanded to manage the resulting dislocation, yet the mortality data show it has not closed the health gap. If anything, the concentration of premature death among recipients suggests that prolonged dependence, low incomes, and the loss of purpose compound physical and psychological harm.
Artificial intelligence is now set to accelerate the same dynamic. The optimistic case holds that productivity gains will fund generous universal transfers, rendering work optional and distributing abundance.
The more probable trajectory, already visible in the AIHW numbers, is the enlargement of a class of people whose labour is no longer required at market rates, whose local skills and traditions have been devalued, and whose health outcomes reflect prolonged economic sidelining.
Current unemployment and disability recipients already experience elevated rates of the very conditions, cardiovascular disease, substance-related deaths, suicide, that track with economic exclusion.
Scaling that exclusion through automation, without rebuilding the intermediate institutions of place and mutual obligation, is unlikely to produce leisure and plenty. It is more likely to expand the cohort living with the mortality profile the AIHW has documented.
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Australia’s experience under decades of globalisation supplies the caution. Local manufacturing, agricultural communities, and the informal networks that sustained them have contracted in favour of metropolitan service economies and open capital flows.
McDonalds, Hungry Jacks, KFC, Red Roosters and Domino Pizzas proliferate across the suburban landscapes, while local hamburger and fish and chip shops have almost entirely disappeared. Woolworths, Coles and Aldi replace farmer’s markets and corner stores.
The result has not been uniform enrichment but a growing divide between those still attached to high-value activity and those managed by income support. AI, left to the same market and policy logics, risks deepening that divide rather than dissolving it. The “useless eaters” framing is crude, yet the data show a population already dying earlier and differently precisely because their economic role has narrowed.
The scale of the disparity – nearly three-fifths of working-age deaths occurring among people on support, with extreme elevations in deaths of despair – cannot be dismissed as coincidence.
If Universal Abundance is the promised destination, the present evidence from Australia’s welfare population is the road map of what happens when work, place, and customary roles are stripped away without replacement.
Misery, not leisure, has been the measurable outcome so far.
Further Reading
To read the original AIHW report go HERE.
Post-Work Society Australia
Premature Death on Welfare (9 of 11)Premature
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